London in 3 days

British Museum (Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury; founded 1753 around Sir Hans Sloane's bequest of 71,000 objects and opened to the public in 1759 as the world's first free national museum). Sir Robert Smirke's Greek Revival quadrangle and its 44 Ionic columns went up between 1823 and 1852; Norman Foster's glass-and-steel canopy over the Great Court, unveiled in 2000, enclosed the courtyard around the old Reading Room and created Europe's largest covered square. Open daily 10:00–17:00, Fridays until 20:30, closed 24–26 December. Admission free (suggested donation £5); major temporary exhibitions run £16–£22 and the multimedia guide about £7. Three rooms carry the collection. Room 4: the Rosetta Stone (196 BCE), the trilingual decree — hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek — that Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion used to break the hieroglyphic script by 1822. Room 18: the Parthenon sculptures, the frieze and metopes Lord Elgin removed from the Acropolis between 1801 and 1812, the most contested objects in any museum; Greece has formally sought their return since 1983. Room 40: the Lewis Chessmen, walrus-ivory pieces carved in 12th-century Norway and found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. Insider tip: ignore the Great Russell Street queue and walk round to the Montague Place entrance on the north side — same galleries, usually no line, and it drops you two floors from Room 4. Friday evenings after 18:00 are the quietest hours of the week. The Great Court Restaurant beneath the roof does a decent afternoon tea (around £30); the better move is the Museum Tavern opposite the gates for a pint, or a five-minute walk east to Lamb's Conduit Street for lunch. Bloomsbury around it is Georgian squares, University of London faculties and the antiquarian bookshops of Museum Street and Bury Place.

Tate Modern (Bankside, 53 Holland Street, SE1 9TG; Sun–Thu 10:00–18:00, Fri–Sat 10:00–22:00, last entry 45 minutes before closing; permanent collection free, ticketed exhibitions £22–£26, under-12s free): Britain's national collection of international art from 1900 onward, opened May 2000 inside Bankside Power Station, built 1947–63 by Giles Gilbert Scott — the architect of the K2 telephone box and Liverpool Anglican Cathedral — decommissioned in 1981 and converted by Herzog & de Meuron, who returned in 2016 with the perforated-brick Blavatnik Building. The Turbine Hall (35m high, 155m long) serves as both entrance and stage for the annual commission, still the most consequential public art platform in Britain: Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun (2003), Doris Salcedo's 167-metre fissure in the floor (2007). Upstairs, give the Rothko room its full half-hour — nine Seagram Murals painted for a Manhattan restaurant, withheld from it, hung deliberately dim — then the Surrealism and Dada galleries in the Natalie Bell Building. Level 10 of the Blavatnik has a free 360-degree terrace across the Thames to St Paul's. Skip the Level 6 café; ten minutes east at Borough Market the same money buys Kappacasein's raclette or half a dozen oysters at Wright Brothers. Insider tip: enter down the west ramp on Holland Street rather than through the river doors — you descend into the Turbine Hall at full height, which is how the room was meant to be met, and before 11:00 on a weekday you get it nearly empty. The Millennium Bridge lands at the north door for the City; Shakespeare's Globe, Southwark Cathedral and the Bankside river walk are all within five minutes.

Shoreditch and Brick Lane occupy the 3km corridor east of the City of London that shifted from textile warehouses and Bangladeshi immigration settlement (the Bengali community arrived in force from the 1970s, clustering along Brick Lane) into Europe's most restless street art district. The scene accelerated after Banksy began wheat-pasting here in the early 2000s; today Hanbury Street, Rivington Street, and the Shoreditch back-street network cycle through new murals monthly, with Zabou, ROA, and Eine among the internationally recognised names. The Village Underground Tube carriages marooned on Great Eastern Street and the walls around Box Park (Shoreditch High Street; Mon–Sat 11:00–23:00, Sun 12:00–22:00; free to enter) are the anchor landmarks. Brick Lane market runs every Sunday 10:00–17:00 (free entry): the northern Truman Brewery yard concentrates the best vintage clothing stalls in London (budget £15–40 for a real find), while the indoor Backyard Market holds independent makers and street food vendors. For eating, walk Brick Lane itself for Bangladeshi curry — Aladin at No. 132 is the honest local choice; expect £9–14 for a main. Beigel Bake at No. 159 operates 24 hours and charges £1.30 for a salt beef bagel. Insider tip: arrive before 09:30 on Sunday — the stall traders are still setting up, the mural light is clean, and the bagel queue is short. Shoreditch High Street Overground or 20-minute walk from Liverpool Street.

Dishoom's first café opened on Upper St Martin's Lane in 2010, cousins Shamil and Kavi Thakrar's reconstruction of the Bombay Irani café — the all-comers teahouses that Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran built across the city from the 1900s, of which barely thirty now survive in Mumbai. Nottingham designers Macaulay Sinclair supplied the grammar: bentwood chairs, marble tables, slow ceiling fans, chequerboard tile, sepia family portraits, tarnished brass. For the building itself, go to King's Cross (Stable Street, 2014) — a Victorian railway transit shed behind Granary Square with a double-height dining room, a first-floor verandah and a walled courtyard. Order the Bacon Naan Roll (around £11.50): tandoor-blistered naan, cream cheese, chilli-tomato jam, smoked streaky bacon — the most sensible breakfast in the city — with a House Chai (£3.90) and Chilli Cheese Toast. At dinner: House Black Daal (about £12.50), black urad lentils simmered over 24 hours to something nearer chocolate than pulse, the recipe unchanged since opening; then Chicken Ruby, Okra Fries, a Gunpowder Potato. Hours run roughly 08:00–23:00 Monday to Thursday (09:00 opening at weekends, midnight close Friday and Saturday); breakfast service ends at 11:45. Reckon £25–40 a head with a drink. Insider note: reservations are taken for lunch and for groups of six or more, so the famous queue is strictly an evening phenomenon. Walk in before 09:00 and the room is yours; turn up at 19:30 in Shoreditch and expect 45–60 minutes, though the basement Permit Room bar will hold you with a chai-and-rum and take your name. Shoreditch sits at the head of Brick Lane's curry mile — worth the five-minute walk beforehand for the contrast between the revival and the originals.

Tower of London (Tower Hill, EC3N 4AB; UNESCO World Heritage Site). Founded by William the Conqueror in 1066; the White Tower, the Norman keep at its centre, was begun around 1078 under Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and remained the tallest stone building in Britain for two centuries. Twenty towers, two curtain walls and a dry moat accreted around it over the following 500 years. Open Tue–Sat 09:00–17:30, Sun–Mon 10:00–17:30 (last entry 16:30); from November to February it shuts an hour earlier. Adult £34.80 online, child £17.40, under-5s free; Historic Royal Palaces membership at £69 pays for itself in two visits and covers Hampton Court. Go to the Crown Jewels first: the working regalia, including the Imperial State Crown (2,868 diamonds, made for George VI in 1937) and the contested 105.6-carat Koh-i-Noor. Then the White Tower's Line of Kings armoury, Henry VIII's outsized suits among it, and the graffiti Tudor prisoners scratched into the Beauchamp Tower walls. The Yeoman Warders — 37 of them, each with 22+ years' military service — run free hour-long tours every 30 minutes from 10:00, and theirs is the best hour on site. Insider tip: be at the gate at 09:00 and walk straight to the Jewel House before the coach parties land, then double back for a tour. For the Ceremony of the Keys, the locking-up ritual performed nightly at 21:53 for seven centuries, tickets carry a £5 booking fee and are released months in advance; book the day they drop. Eat elsewhere. The New Armouries Café is serviceable, but five minutes east lies St Katharine Docks, a yacht basin ringed with terraces and the Dickens Inn. Tower Bridge is two minutes south; the City's glass towers begin one street north.

St Paul's Cathedral (Ludgate Hill, EC4M) is the fifth church on a site first consecrated in 604 CE, and the one Christopher Wren built between 1675 and 1711 after the Great Fire of 1666 took the medieval cathedral along with 87 other City churches. The dome reads as a single vault but is three: an outer lead shell for the skyline, a hidden brick cone carrying the weight of the stone lantern, and the inner dome painted by Sir James Thornhill (1715–19) with eight scenes from the life of St Paul. Climb it in stages — 257 steps to the Whispering Gallery, where a murmur against the wall travels the full 34m circumference to the far side; 528 to the Golden Gallery at 85m, with the Thames and the Barbican laid out below. The crypt holds Nelson, Wellington and Wren himself, under the line "If you seek his monument, look around you"; Churchill's state funeral filled the nave in 1965. Sightseeing hours are Monday–Saturday 8.30am–4.30pm, last entry 4pm, with the dome galleries closing a little earlier; the cathedral is closed to ticketed visitors on Sundays for worship. Expect around £26 on the door, a few pounds less booked online, roughly £11 for children 6–17 and free for under-6s, with a multimedia guide included. Insider tip: skip the ticket and come for Choral Evensong, sung at 5pm most weekdays and 3.15pm on Sunday — free, about 45 minutes, and you sit in the Grinling Gibbons quire stalls rather than shuffling past them. Afterwards the crypt café does a proper scone and pot of tea under the tombs; for the photograph everyone wants, take the lift to the free sixth-floor terrace at One New Change opposite, where the dome fills the frame at eye level.

The Barbican Estate rises from a 16-hectare bombsite left by the Blitz — specifically the firestorm of 29 December 1940, which gutted the City's medieval street pattern overnight. Architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon won the commission in 1955 and spent nearly three decades completing the complex; the Barbican Centre opened in 1982 as Europe's largest multi-arts venue. The brutalist towers and elevated walkways feel deliberately disorienting at first: persevere past the podium levels and you reach a surprisingly serene lakeside terrace with resident herons and a conservatory packed with tropical plants (free; open Sundays and select Saturdays, noon–5pm). Inside, the Concert Hall is home to the London Symphony Orchestra — tickets from £12 for daytime rehearsal concerts, £30–£85 for evening performances. The Art Gallery (Sun–Wed 10am–6pm, Thu–Sat 10am–9pm; around £20) runs serious international exhibitions. The cinemas screen repertory and arthouse; Screen 1 keeps its original 1980s raked seating. Eat at the Barbican Kitchen (ground floor, 9am–11pm daily) for straightforward, affordable plates before a show. A ten-minute walk south, the Millennium Bridge (Arup and Foster + Partners, 2000) had to close within two days of opening — synchronised pedestrian footfall triggered lateral resonance across the entire span. Two years and £5 million in tuned mass dampers later, it reopened. Cross at dusk for the cleanest view of St Paul's dome from the Thames. Free, no queue.

Covent Garden is Inigo Jones's 1631 piazza — England's first planned public square, built for the 4th Earl of Bedford — filled in 1830 by Charles Fowler's iron-and-granite market hall, which traded fruit and vegetables until 1974, when the wholesalers decamped to Nine Elms. What's left is a shopping arcade with unusually good bones. Browse the Apple Market in the North Hall (antiques on Monday, craft and design Tuesday–Sunday, roughly 10:00–18:00), then take the steps down to the sunken courtyard, where classical players busk under the glass. Pitches here are auditioned annually and split by type: opera and strings below, street theatre on the West Piazza in front of St Paul's — the 1633 Actors' Church, where Pepys recorded England's first Punch and Judy show in 1662. Dinner at Rules, 35 Maiden Lane (established 1798, London's oldest restaurant; Mon–Sat 12:00–23:00, Sun 12:00–22:00). The kitchen's whole argument is game from its own estate in the High Pennines — grouse, teal and snipe in season, with steak-and-kidney pudding and potted shrimps year-round. Starters £12–18, mains £28–48. No jacket required, but trainers and sportswear are turned away. The insider move: skip the booking scramble entirely and go upstairs to Rules' cocktail bar, walk-in only, where a gin and tonic runs about £14 beneath Edwardian oils and taxidermy — better company than anything on the Piazza. If it's full, the Royal Opera House amphitheatre bar on Bow Street serves non-ticketholders and opens onto a terrace above the rooftops. Walk the last of it off northwards through Neal's Yard into Seven Dials, whose sundial pillar still marks a 1690s speculative street plan; Neal's Yard Dairy on Shorts Gardens shuts at 19:00 if you want cheese for the flight home.